The Australian born business leader in 2003 was six weeks into the job of running a British government authority charged with rescuing broken communities, crippled by drug and alcohol abuse and generations of unemployment.

“I knew nothing about local politics and engagement. I arrived and I looked at everything from a straight commercial bent _ all these proposals from communities and councils and local authorities to invest in areas which were suffering from market failure,” Higgins tells Saturday Extra.

“Before I knew it I had what’s called an early day motion against me in parliament, which is when MPs get together and gang up on you and say ‘you’re not fit for purpose’.”

He explained to his chairman at English Partnerships, Baroness Margaret Ford: “That will be those local authorities putting up unrealistic non-commercial projects wanting us to fund them … and if this is their way of blackmailing me, this is pathetic.”

Her reply was unexpected: “Get out of London, get up to these communities, talk to the local residents, engage with the local authorities, understand what they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis, what it is that they really struggle with every day, not in your ivory tower in London … Find a solution that works for Treasury here in London but also works for the communities. And don’t come back until you can solve it.”

A maverick and visionary who then went on to lead the most dramatic regeneration of the urban environment in recent English history, Higgins says the solutions he gave to Baroness Ford provide a planning template for Sydney.

“That’s the issue of Sydney, you’ve got to be able to say ‘what are we giving back to Sydney that’s going to last 100 years,” says Higgins ahead of his highly anticipated keynote address on Tuesday, the Bradfield Oration for The Daily Telegraph’s Project Sydney campaign.

“There is a bigger picture here.”

The 63-year-old has this call out to the ruling baby boomer generation: “You have got to think: ‘What have we left behind that future generations will think you haven’t just given us debts, environmental contamination, crowding and congestion and poor air quality and made yourself rich, you’ve actually left something future generations think are of real value’.”

After the Baroness Ford take-down, Higgins says he found inventive new ways of funding the reinvention of dying English communities. He cites Milton Keynes, north of London as a game-changer. It was here that he introduced the first infrastructure tariff, approved via a referendum, to fund “everything from education to public transport to sewerage”. His pitch was: “If you vote for growth, this is what we, the government, and the council and the landowners will invest in your community.”

Milton Keynes was a “deeply depressed” community, which had been home to Moors murderer Myra Hindley of the 1960s child killing spree. “This was not an attractive area.”

But it was very well connected via train and motorways and the plan utilised those connections and replaced derelict houses and vacant land with new housing and commercial space. By rezoning the land the uptick in value by 2004 _ a year after Higgins began in the English Partnership’s job _ was between (pounds) 300- 400 million, and part of that increase was put into an infrastructure funding pot to further improve the community.

Next he ran London’s Olympic development authority, for which he received a knighthood. Now he is chairman of Gatwick Airport as well as the biggest infrastructure project in Europe, Britain’s revolutionary (pounds) 65 billion High Speed Rail.

With a civil engineering degree from Sydney University, Higgins had run Lend Lease in Sydney, building Olympic park for the 2000 games, before moving with the company to London, where he has lived for the past 18 years. In 2014 he was appointed a director on the Commonwealth Bank board and makes regular visits back to Australia.

When the competition to run London’s Olympic Development Authority came up his pitch to government was radical.

“I wasn’t doing it for the sport, I wasn’t doing because I like the Olympics, as interesting as they are. I thought ‘here’s a device to force the government to spend some decent money to fix up East London once and for all’.

“I’d seen a fair bit of East London by this time and I thought, it’s a deeply deprived area, very distressed and a rubbish dump in some ways … with sewerage through it and fridges piled up, really disgusting _ the rubbish of London. It was terribly deprived … three generations of unemployment.”

Once in the Olympic development job, Higgins began winning the hearts and minds and money of the government and the community. “You have to say why you are doing it.”

He discovered the life expectancy of people in East London compared with the centre was five years. He created a punchy poster of the London tube line, showing for each of the six stops from Westminster in central London to the Olympic site, people lost a year of their lives.

“I remember the parliamentarians … saying you’ve got to stop this, it’s embarrassing. I said, ‘It is and you’re going to have to live with that’.”

The result has been a stunning transformation of the area, with a pretty tree-lined canal in the place of a fetid open sewer.

His current project, the Hs2, High Speed Rail, will provide futuristic rail, replacing the 170-year-old run-down train line. The NSW comparison of Hs2 stage one _ 200km long, half in tunnels and opening in 2026 _ is the 270km between Newcastle and Wollongong.

“It would be forty minutes to get from one end to the other and a train every two minutes. Phase two is the equivalent of Sydney to Goulburn and Canberra and that would be an hour to the end of the line.”

To the common suggestion that it’s more complicated to build something like this in NSW he says: “You must be kidding.” Hs2 is carving through “some of the most protected and cherished farm land in the country”, and 60,000 graves are being moved.

In Cheshire he asked an elderly couple _ opposed to the line due to the construction noise and with no station near them, planning never to use it _ whether they had grandchildren, noting the last big company based in the area was about to leave, removing final employment opportunities.

He said: “I am not asking you to vote for the inconvenience you are going to suffer today, but I ask you to consider your grandchildren before you make your own decision. I’m not being patronising about the inconvenience that’s going to happen, but it’s disturbing to see what’s going to happen to your community unless we do something about it.”

The Gatwick Airport chairman says Sydney’s second airport “probably should have happened many many years ago” but adds a key caveat: “Build in a comprehensive plan of what’s going to happen out there.

“If it’s just an airport, its useless. What’s the public going to get, apart from an airport and motorways? What’s the trade-off for the community putting up with that?”

In addition to the hi-tech industry which is expected to develop around the airport, Higgins says as a minimum the project should come with a huge park.

“Parks are the most expensive thing to build, because it’s so tempting to cut them back and sell them off as commercial development. Where’s the new land we’ve created in Sydney for fabulous public parks in the last 50 years?.”

He adds: “I think that’s the challenge for the baby boomers who grew up in a privileged time, who are the richest generation in history. What will they leave behind?”